For four days scholars from ten countries met in the lovely salon of Schloss Wahn to discuss imperial formations and how they can be studied in comparative, entangled and/or global histories.

Participants of the 4th GRAINES summer school

We focused on actors, personal networks and specific localities, especially on the less “typical” imperial situations that are often marginalized in historical scholarship on empire. However, despite this attention to historical specificities we analyzed imperial formations in a broad geographic and chronological framework, from the Spanish conquest of the Philippines over early modern colonialism in North America to high imperialism and processes of decolonization in various parts of the world.

Lively discussions on theoretical concepts like the “imperial cloud”, “colonial knowledge production”, or “settler imperialism” allowed us relate different imperial projects to each other. Our guest lecturers offered their own theoretical and methodological perspectives on imperial formations. Besides that we also learned new things about travelling maharajas, lonely telegraphists, and strawberry-planting naval officers. Thanks to all of you for your participation and contributions. You have turned the 4th GRAINES summer school into a full success!

The 4th GRAINES summer school takes a closer look at continental and maritime empires from the 17th to the 21st century. We focus on various forms of empires and imperialism, investigate the similarities and differences between imperial settings and discuss how imperial formations can be approached from various disciplinary and methodological standpoints.

Dividing the World? Imperial Formations in Continental and Maritime Empires from the 17th to the 21st century

4th GRAINES Summer School, University of Cologne, 14–17 June 2016

In the winter of 1884/85 representatives of 11 European countries as well as the Ottoman Empire and the United States met in Berlin to discuss and decide the future of the African continent. It was not the first time European powers laid claim on vast territories far from their own. Spain and Portugal had already done so in 1494 when they signed the treaty of Tordesillas, and since then European and a few non-European countries had asserted their economic, political and/or cultural influence over large parts of the world. Nevertheless, the Berlin Africa Conference marked the height of the age of imperialism and until today epitomizes how a small number of powers divided the world amongst them. It also serves to remind us that the modern age was to a large extent shaped by empires and imperialism.

Imperial History has always stressed the importance of empire for the development of modernity. However, until recently scholars have focused mainly on typical colonial empires such as Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Germany and most notably the British Empire. The study of continental and/or non-European empires like Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, China or Japan has not been neglected but undertaken mostly in separate scholarly fields. Besides that, the age of imperialism has often been regarded as a mere transitory period in the rise of the modern nation state.

During the last years, though, globalization and the end of the Cold War have sparked a renewed theoretical and empirical interest in political formations beyond the nation state. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt reintroduced the concept of empire to describe post-modern political phenomena. Historians like Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard focussed on the age of imperialism instead, but compared maritime and continental empires. Others, like Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, included different types of empires in the same analytical framework. And Ann Laura Stoler and Carol McGranahan questioned the usefulness of “empire” as an analytical frame altogether. They suggest studying imperial formations, which include settings that are not part of empires, but characterized by imperial conditions like flexible borders, heterogeneous populations, a lack of legitimacy from below, legal inequalities and civilizing missions. Thus the scholarly field of imperial studies has broadened beyond European maritime empires and the age of high imperialism.

Based on this broad approach the GRAINES Summer School 2016 will take a closer look at imperial formations in continental and maritime empires from the 17th to the 21st century. We will focus on various forms of empires and imperialism, be they European or non-European, capitalist, socialist or fascist, modern, early modern or post-modern, territorial or non-territorial. During our seminars, reading groups and lectures we will discuss the similarities and differences between those settings and how imperial formations can be approached from various disciplinary and methodological standpoints.

Our guiding questions are:

• How do we define imperial formations? What is the relationship between imperialism and colonialism? What distinguishes or links states, nations and empires?
• Are there specific forms of imperial rule? What constitutes them? How are they legitimized? Where and when do they produce resistance or resilience?
• Are there specific imperial forms of belonging and citizenship within imperial formations? How is difference produced? What role do intersecting dimensions of race, class, gender, nationality etc. play in this process?
• How are imperial formations organized spatially? Do they have centres and peripheries, borders, boundaries or frontiers? What is the relationship between different spaces of empire? How are they produced?
• How did imperial formations reshape practices of consumption? Did empire effect trade, production and processing? What perceptions and imaginations of imperial economies existed?
• When and where do imperial formations compete or cooperate? Do they exchange expertise and people? Is there a transfer of imperial practices and discourses? Which concepts do they borrow, adopt or adapt and which are discarded?
• How are imperial formations represented (through maps, photographs, museums and exhibitions, literature, films, video games…)?

The summer school is organised by the Graduate Interdisciplinary Network for European Studies (GRAINES) in cooperation with the University of Cologne and the Global South Studies Center (Competence Area IV). The program includes reading and discussion groups, lectures and excursions, as well as room for the presentation and discussion of student projects. While the summer school will have a distinct interdisciplinary and trans-epochal character, potential participants should demonstrate historical awareness and general interest in history. We invite postgraduate students from a broad range of theoretical perspectives and disciplines to submit their project proposals to the organisers.

The working language of the summer school is English. Accommodation costs will be covered, a limited number of travel bursaries may be available.

To apply, please send your project proposal of maximum 1000 words and a one-page CV by 15 March 2016 to Dörte Lerp at dlerp@uni-koeln.de.

The 4th GRAINES Summer School will be hosted by the University of Cologne in June 2016. The theme is “Dividing the World? Imperial Formations in Continental and Maritime Empires from the 17th to the 21st century”. We will post the exact date, further information and a call for applications here soon.

Thank you all for coming, sharing, listening, writing, collaborating. Three days under the Scottish sun in St Andrews, Fife around networks and transnational history, that was #Graines2015.

We have started discussing hosting #Graines2016 in Cologne – potentially around the theme: empires. For in-between meetings, first ideas have been floated to have one-day events in the spirit of sharing and collaborating. Be aware, more pair-writing and unconference stuff ahead. See: transnationalhistory.net/interconnected.

Over the past years, networks, along with Actor-Network-Theory, have attracted scholars’ attention. While networks are not new as a topic, they have gained attention in particular in the field of global and transnational history. As part of global and transnational research perspectives, as well as in urban or intellectual history, in the history of science or in economic history networks serve multiple purposes. All these fields share an interest in processes of exchange, in connections and flows of people, goods and ideas that can be tracked and analysed through networks.

In these and related fields networks can be:

objects of research

outcome of research

a heuristic device and tool in order to generate research agendas.

Networks may also serve as a way of seeing spatial relations and dynamics beyond (or in addition) to more conventional geographical and territorial frameworks, e.g. nations, empires, regions, cities. The increasing interest in the study of networks coincides with a rapidly changing research environment and the rise of Digital Humanities. A variety of software and computing tools are available to visualise data and networks. This again poses questions on how to treat data, how to narrate and how to collaborate across and between disciplinary boundaries.

In the vein of previous GRAINES summer schools we invite applications from within and beyond the GRAINES network. While GRAINES shares a strong historical orientation with a focus on European history from the late medieval period to the present, we welcome applications from neighboring disciplines like Art History or Literature as well as the sciences (geoscience and computer science).

The purpose of the summer school is to bring together scholars and postgraduate students working on or with the concept of networks in projects related to transnational, global, urban and intellectual history.

Collaborate

The summer school will seeks to be a forum for sharing and collaborating, for knowledge production rather than consumption. In conjunction with more traditional elements such as reading groups, paper presentations, we adopt different elements of collaboration inspired by the model of “unconferences” (a model we successfully used for the “Mapping and Visualising Transnational (Hi)Stories” workshop in June 2014) as well as “Pair programming” in the Humanities.

Pair progamming

Please send your proposal as a single word or PDF document (abstract of a project / proposal of max 250 words; brief biographical sketch of max 150 words including the motivation to participate and what you are willing to contribute & share during the summer school, e.g. contribute to reading group, writing session, workshop introducing a tool or software) to